For CS 5.5 -- GTX 560ti or GTX570?

[Jay West]

I am asking this as a very narrow question.

I am hurriedly putting together a new editing workstation using an I7/3930k CPU and an LGA2011 mobo for a Adobe CS 5.5 system. I'm in a hurry because my 3-year-old I7-9xx system just died. (Hard drives are all okay, and I have backups, so no projects have been lost). For the new video card, I'm trying to choose between a GTX 560ti ---- note the "ti" --- and a GTX 570. I just took a quick pass through Newegg and found that there seems to be a $60 to $100 ($USD) price jump from the 560ti to the 570. I've read that 560ti chipsets are ones that did not make the cut for use on 570 cards, kind of like a "570 Lite" maybe?

So, I'm wondering what kind of difference the extra $100 will make for what I do with CS 5.5? It does not look like much practical difference to me, but I may be missing something. It looks like a plain vanilla 560 (without the "ti") might have some difficulties when run with a 3930K on the kinds of projects I do. (Not entirely sure why, but there seems to be some kind of bottleneck or maybe just speculation about bottlenecks.) In my hasty searching, I ran across postings from people happily using a GTX570 card with the 3930k but have not yet found any about using a 560ti with the 3930k CPU.

Here's the kinds of things I work with: a lot of multi-cam editing and projects with multiple layers (sometimes seven cameras plus three tracks of "titles" and sometimes various color matching effects and the odd picture-in picture. I only occasionally work with oversize images in Photoshop 5.5, and only dabble with After Effects. I mainly deliver projects on DVD. I'll be replacing a GTX 260 card, which was more or less okay for CS 5 but has been barely adequate under CS 5.5 -- albeit with work-arounds and interludes of patience --- and the death of the old 260 is merely the latest breakdown that necessitates/provokes this exercise.

I have looked at the PPBM 5 results on Haarm Millard's site, but I haven't been able to draw much of a conclusion, yet. Those results reflect varying degrees of system tuning including some very interesting overclocking.

As far as overclocking goes, I simply won't have time to do much in the way of overclocking and tuning until, maybe. next summer. (That's how business is running right now.) In the meantime, any overclocking will likely be limited to the mild automated overclocking that the "AI" app does on the ASUS mobo I will be buying.

The system is exclusively for video editing. I am utterly uninterested in gaming. I have another computer for the business side (invoices, accounting, word-processing, etc.) I use anMXO2 mini for external monitoring on a sorta-calibrated tv monitor. I do run my editing with two DVI computer monitors (one for the main edit screen, the other for an expanded timeline and for the multi-cam display).

My take is that there won't be much of a benefit for me to get a 570 as opposed to the 560ti. I was thinking of going even lower with DDR5 equipped GTX cards, but older postings from Randall Leong and others indicate that cards like the GTX550 might not be much of an improvement for me over the old GTX 260 that I have been using with my 9xx system. (I understand that even a GTX 550 could be a big improvement for some folks; I just can't find enough info to say it will do well with the kind of editing I've outlined above.) I get that more CUDA cores and RAM bandwith can help deal with multiple layers which is why I focused on the 570 and now the 560ti.

At the risk of sounding ill-tempered, please understand that I am trying to ask a very narrow question. Yes, I do know that you can only gang four cameras at a time PPro's multi-cam window, and yes I do use Cineform Neo when I have the time (although I increasingly have short delivery deadlines which don't leave me enough time to do the Cineform conversions. ) Also, I work with multiple SATA drives and two RAID arrays (run off an actual PCIe RAID card), so I won't have any major disk-througput issues. I've been building my-own systems for a couple of decades, now, so I am very careful about case sizes, noise and cooling issues, and will be getting either a Lian Li or HAF932 case for the new system. I also am careful about power supplies. I have been using a PC Power and Coolling 750w Silencer PSU and will probably be moving up to a 1000w unit (probably by PC P&C, as well). So thanks in advance for such concerns, please do not feel slighted because I wish to limit this discussion to choosing between the two video cards.

[Harm Millaard]

Jay,

You don't strike as a person to eke out the last seconds of performance, since you declared that overclocking is something for the future. You just want to get your projects finished in a stable and reliable way. My guess is that the 560 Ti is enough for you at this moment. You will be hard pressed to see any difference with the 570, apart from the price.

When the time comes for overclocking, nVidia will have come out with their new 7xx line and you will have lots of new options. For the moment I would seriously consider the 560 Ti.

[Jay West]

Thank you very much, especially for the rapid response. You are exactly right that I am very focused on reliability and stability. (Being very busy will do that to you.) My plan was to be fussing with the new 6xx or 7xx line of nVidia cards --- and Sandy Bridge E processors and mobos --- sometime in the summer after I had plenty of time get a grasp on how the new stuff works. A "death in the family," as it were, has pushed me into be any early adopter of the 3930K. You have confirmed my impressions on currently available cards and that confirmation mitigates the stress of venturing out onto new ice.

I'll report back after I get the new system up and running.

[Marty Hudzik]

On Nvidias site it stated the GTX570 has 480 Cuda cores while the 560ti is listed as 384 Cuda cores.....so there is a decent difference between them. I can tell you that I have a 570 paired with the same processor that you have and it works great. Personally, I'd go with the 570 to be 100% safe. No overclocking and adittional 100 cores seems pretty significant to me.

[Jay West]

Well, I appreciate hearing that you've got a GTX570 working well with an I7-3930k. As I've got your attention, would you mind saying which motherboard you chose and what are you got for cooling the 3930k since it does not come with a fan? Any problems getting your system together?
I'm kind of stalled, right now. I've been trying --- vainly --- to find a reputable vendor who actually has a 3930k in stock. Intel stopped shipping the 3930k and apparently will not starting shipping again for a couple of weeks. So I haven't bought anything yet.

But, back to your point about more cores in the GTX 570. Any idea how much and what kinds of difference that actually makes for PPro CS5.5 editors?

There are two versions of the 560ti, one with 384 cores and another with 448 cores. The 448 core ones supposedly use de-rated 570 chips. Each of those three cards has double and more cores than I have with my old (and possibly defunct) old GTX260. The PPBM test results (PPBM5 Benchmark) show a pretty clear benefit to replacing a worn-out GTX260. No question there. But, it is different when it comes to choosing between the 560ti (or even a 550ti) and higher GTX models, at least for the multi-layer editing I often do, its not clear that there would a signifcant or readily observable difference to someone who is not trying to eke out the last few seconds of performance advantage,

The question for me is how much real benefit would I get from having an additional 32 to 80 cores in my GTX card?

I do not mean this as criticism of anybody else's choices. It is just that, for what I'm actually planning, my suspicion was that there wouldn't be much difference for the multi-layer editing I often do.

[Randall Leong]

Jay,

On those super-fast systems such as the i7-3930K-based systems, then yes, there is a tangible difference in performance between a 384-core GTX 560 Ti and a 480-core GTX 570. But whether the GTX 570 is worth the extra $100 over the regular GTX 560 Ti performance-wise depends on other factors, such as the total number and sequential-speed performance of all of the hard disks that you're using on such a high-end rig.

So in other words, if your high-end rig is still equipped with no more than a couple of disks or a molasses-slow, cheapo disk system, the higher-end GPU would have been mostly a waste of money.

[Jay West]

No disagreement here about optimizing disk storage and other sub-systems. Pretty much what I thought I was trying to get at with the last paragraph of my opening post, too.

The question I'm trying to get at is, all other things being assumed equal, how much difference does a 570 make over a 560ti in a 3930k system? Initially, I was thinking this was like the choice I faced a few years back when I opted for GTX260 over a GTX 285 for my (now recently deceased) I7/9xx system? The differences between the 260 and 285 were crucial for some folks but did not seem to matter much for the work I was doing, But now that I have to unexpectedly shop for a replacement, I found myself wondering if the 570 might be a minimum threshold for working with a 3930? Would I need the extra 32 or 84 cores in order for graphics to keep up with a 3930k while running CS 5.5? (Ah, the joys and terrors of trying to hurriedly replace a dead system by blindly buying parts online!).

The responses so far seem to be a general reassurance that a GTX570 is a better but not crucial choice.

Now, if I could only get my hands on a 3930 CPU. . .

[Harm Millaard]

Jay,

If I assume you will be overclocking the 3930K to 4 GHz or higher somewhere in the future, and I further assume there is a limit to your budget, the question is how to get the best balanced system within that budget, whatever it may be, $ 4K or $ 5K or even higher.

A super fast CPU, lots of memory and a good (560 Ti with 448 cores) or very good video card (570) also requires a very good disk I/O system and that is usually the bottleneck, especially in these days with the inflated hard disk prices.

What would be a good disk I/O system? IMO, it entails a dedicated raid controller, like the Areca ARC-1882iX-12/16 with 4 GB cache and a BBM (battery backup module). That will set you back around € 960 (800+40+120) at today's prices in the Netherlands. Add to that the disks required, for instance 1.5 TB Hitachi 7K3000 at € 120 each, so with say 6 disks in a raid3/5 array, you need to add € 720 for the disks.

You see that this really adds up, especially if you want to go for even larger arrays or add hot-spares to the array for safety and uninterrupted workflow. With the budget limit, the choice of the 560 Ti or the 570 may become moot. And again IMO, the saving of € 100 on the video card can be used to buy another disk, where it will be noticeable for all editing activities, in contrast to the video card, that only shows benefits when using hardware accelerated MPE effects, transitions and scaling. If you use third party effects like Red Giant or Boris that do not support CUDA enabled MPE, the gain will be even less from the more expensive video card, but the gain from a more extensive disk I/O system will be (very) noticeable.

[Jay West]

Yup. That was pretty much my thinking.

[Jay West]

Let me clarify that last remark for anybody coming late to this party.

I am indeed doing some budgetary juggling. But, not for a hardware RAID or more disks. I accumulated these with my last system. (Yes, Harm and Randall, I paid attention to your many useful postings on this subject).

Right now, where I, personnally, need to juggle is with the cost of replacing my existing UPS units. Clean power is essential for video editing workstations, especially when overclocking with the newer CPUs and running raids, etc. (Add that to Harm's budgetary figures, above.) The units I have are no longer doing a good job with "auto voltage regulation." Maybe, they never did a very good job. The units I'm looking at now are significantly more expensive than the ones I am replacing. I'm starting a separate thread on this subject.

[Mikko Topponen]

How can there be a difference between the cards as Premiere isn't even utilising my GTX 580 at 20%? Usually it uses about 10-15% of it's raw shader power.

[Jay West]

Good question. I will confess that I do not know how the shaders are involved nor how one measures that. Are you referring, maybe, to "cores"?

But, I wonder how many layers and effects you are working with when you see what sounds like low usage of the GPU and also what the other system specs are. For instance, for somebody running a stock I7-920 in a system with only a couple of drives, the system might not be able to feed enough data fast enough to keep up with a GTX580. This changes with a more elaborately equipped and well tuned system. With overclocking and the kinds of disk arrays mentioned by Harm and Randall, one might would likely see more impact on the GPU. I think I recall reading some postings by Randall on the subject of GPU usage and system configuration, although I do not recall anything specifically about shaders.

Also, my understanding is that the demands on the GTX cards increase as you add layers. For example, you might not be taxing the GPU in your example because you might be working with, say, one track of HDV, some tiles and a few dissolves as transitions. In my case, I might see much more use of the GPU with a concert video shot with 4 AVCHD cams and 3 HDV cams for which, in editing, I might need color matching effects on three of the tracks, a variety of transitions (some clients want a lot of glltz) and picture-in-picture effects, all of which load up the GPU.

If you have not already tried this, something that might help you sort this out would be to download the PPBM5 test footage and program, and trying running it on your system. That might give you a better sense of what is going on. Check out www.pbm5.com

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Mikko Topponen

How can there be a difference between the cards as Premiere isn't even utilising my GTX 580 at 20%? Usually it uses about 10-15% of it's raw shader power.

Premiere Pro CS5.5 doesn't even have to use all of a card's power to notice a tangible difference. As I stated in another forum, CS5.5 requires a CUDA GPU with at least 192 shader units ("CUDA cores") and at least 192 bits of DDR5 VRAM bus width just to avoid performing downright sluggish with MPE GPU acceleration enabled. For example, the GTX 260 and the GTX 550 Ti both have 192 CUDA cores - but as Bill Gehrke's testing has proved, the GTX 550 Ti is slightly slower than the GTX 260 because the GTX 550 Ti's 192-bit DDR5 VRAM has less total bandwidth than the GTX 260's 448-bit DDR3 VRAM.